The frontlines of Eastern Ukraine have become a sadly familiar sight to anyone who watches the news. While we await new feature films about the war with Russia from Ukrainian directors, the immersive, experiential Zero Position by Canadian photographer and filmmaker Louie Palu captures the melancholy mood of a land suffused by death and destruction. It bowed at Hot Docs.
The documentary is entirely made up of material, expressively shot and starkly edited, filmed in 2016 by Palu and his small crew in the Donbas region. This is where Ukraine’s war with Russian separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk has been lethally dragging on since 2014. Eight years later, Russia’s invasion of the whole country turned the war into a topic of eminent interest. Unlike the surcharged atmosphere of TV news, Palu proves to be a patient, quiet observer intent on uncovering the “unseen forces” that underlie the conflict. He talks to civilians and combatants on both sides of the frontlines, visits an iron and steel plant, enters a frontline home full of children and descends underground with pro-Russian coal miners.
The fact that the film never takes sides can be disconcerting, particularly when viewed at the emotional time of Russia’s invasion of the country. As the film goes on and the crew interacts with more and more soldiers and civilians in both Ukrainian-controlled and Russian-controlled territory, there are times when we can’t be sure what side the interviewees support, until a stray remark clues us in.
Even Palu, invisible behind the camera, and his on-camera cohort Brendan Hoffman (identified as an American photojournalist), have to ask whether the objects on the ground are Russian shrapnel, mortars, mines. Their interests often seem unguided and unsure and they do nothing to hide their nervousness at being in a war zone and being exposed to sudden death, even while Ukrainian soldiers confidently lead them through desolate fields and point out land mines and sharpshooters.
Above all, Zero Position (a title glossed as being on the frontline and in the line of fire) is a visual experience, shot with a poet’s eye for bleakness and the desolation of things out of whack. The opening shot is unforgettable: the hand-held camera walks down an empty highway at dusk until the road ends in a sickening, jagged tear. As the camera approaches the edge, we see that the road is really a bridge that has fallen thirty feet below onto an underpass. This visceral sense of danger and fear continues rather implacably throughout the film, as the landscape becomes ever more surreal. A nervous hike through a shelled power plant leads to visions of futuristic buildings blasted to smithereens, always seen through the lens of Palu’s point-of-view, handheld camera.
And then, quite suddenly, we are standing in the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, where a workman supervises a fiery furnace and molten liquid steel is still pouring out, despite war damage. The eerie thought is that, six years later in 2022, this very plant is destined to become first a refuge and then a trap for civilians and Ukrainian forces under Russian siege.
The editing is essential and elegant, while Alex Khaskin’s music heightens the strangeness and uncertainty of the images. Time and time again, the no-frills camerawork strikes the heart with new perceptions of war taking place in what is basically an empty space in the country, where most of the modest houses still stand along the road. Could Palu’s camera but look into the near future, it would no doubt shudder at what these places had become.
Director, producer, cinematography: Louie Palu
Screenwriters: Murray Brewster, Louie Palu
Associate producer: Chloe Coleman
Editing: Lawrence Jackman
Music: Alex Khaskin
Production companies: Summit Road Films (Canada)
World sales: Summit Road (Toronto)
Venue: Hot Docs Film Festival (competition)
In English, Ukrainian, Russian
85 minutes
